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PLANET QUEST:
The Epic Discovery of Alien Solar Systems.
By Ken Croswell. Free Press. 324 pp. $25
Until a few years ago, only three human beings in history could claim to have discovered a planet, and only one of themthe late Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto-lived in the 20th century. Today, however, a growing number of astronomers can make that claim. We now know of more planets beyond our solar system than within it, all of them discovered in the 1990s.
Croswell, an astronomer and the author of The Alchemy of the Heavens ( 1995), tells the stories behind these and earlier breakthroughs. We learn of the discoveries of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto (the three planets in our solar system...